Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

Carrying it, he left his cabin, walked quietly down the corridor, and knocked softly on Mandala’s door. The answer was almost instantaneous.

“Come in!”

The lock clicked free; he went into the darkened cabin.

“What’s the matter?” Mandala had her uniform shirt half over her head already, assuming an emergency for which she would be needed.

“It’s all right,” Hikaru said. “It’s just me.”

She looked out at him from the tangle of her shirt. It covered the lower half of her face like a mask, and

pulled loose strands of her hair across her forehead.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “You don’t look like you’ve come to get me to help repel an invasion.” She pulled her shirt off again, tossed it on a chair with her pants, and waved the light to the next brightest setting. The gold highlights in her red hair gleamed. When she was on duty she never wore her hair down like this, in a mass that curled around her face and shoulders and all the way to the small of her back. In fact Hikaru supposed he was one of the few people on board who had ever seen it down.

Mandala’s smile faded. “On the other hand you look like something’s wrong. What is it, Hikaru? Sit down.”

He sat on the edge of her bunk. She drew up her knees, still under the blanket, and wrapped her arms around them.

“Come on,” she said gently. “What’s the matter?”

“I did it,” he said. “I applied for a transfer to Hunter’s squadron.”

“She accepted you!” Mandala said with delight.

He nodded.

“You ought to be turning cartwheels,” she said. “It’s just perfect for you.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if I made a mistake. I’m having second thoughts.”

“Hikaru, the Enterprise is a great assignment, but you haven’t been wrong in thinking you need wider experience.”

“I wasn’t thinking professionally. I was thinking personally.”

She glanced away, then back, looked straight into his eyes, and took his hand.

“You see what I meant,” she said. “About getting too attached to anybody.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how you feel. I didn’t even mean to talk about that. I just came to say goodbye, and to give you my sabre. It takes me over the mass allowance.”

Mandala accepted the sabre with the dignity due to it: it was an old sword, and a finely-made one.

“Thank you,” she said. She bent her head down, resting her face against her knees, and he thought she was crying.

“Mandala, hey, I’m sorry—”

Shaking her head violently without looking up, she grabbed his wrist to stop the apology. When she did raise her head, he saw that she was laughing so hard she was in tears.

“No,” she said. “ I’m sorry. It’s beautiful, I’m not laughing at the sabre, only I am, sort of, if I were quick enough on my feet I’d give you—” She glanced around. “Ha, there!” She pulled the heavy ring off the middle finger of her right hand. It was a naturally-formed circle of a stone like ruby, very much the color

of her hair, even to the same golden highlights, at the facets. Except when she was practicing judo, she always wore it. She slipped it on his little finger.

In shooting for her promotion to lieutenant commander, one of the subjects Mandala studied was psychology, including its history. Smiling, she told Hikaru about another century’s theory of sex and symbols: swords and sheaths, locks and keys. When she was finished, he laughed with her at the quaint ideas of a different age.

They looked at each other soberly.

“Did you mean it, what you said before ...”

“I very seldom say anything I don’t mean,” Mandala said. “ Haveyou changed your mind?”

“I... I don’t know.”

“It won’t make things any easier for you, but I wish you would.”

“I’ve been falling in love with you ever since you came on board,” Hikaru said. “But I’m leaving —”

She put her hands on his shoulders. “If you do change your mind it won’t make things easier for me, either. I love you, too, Hikaru, as much as I’ve fought it, and I don’t know if we’re going to be sorrier if we do make love—or if we don’t.”

Mandala stroked his cheek, the corner of his jaw, the hollow of his throat. He leaned toward her and she responded, kissing him gently, her hands spread against his back.

“You can’t imagine how often I’ve wanted to do that,” she whispered. She unfastened his shirt and drew it up over his head, caressing his sides with her fingers. She watched him pull off his boots and his pants; again, she admired his compact athlete’s body. She lifted the bedclothes for him to get in beside her, and as he lay down and turned toward her she drew her hand up his thigh, to his hip, to his waist. Her fingers made slow swirling patterns on his skin, and he shivered. Hikaru kissed her face, all over, small warm kisses; he caressed her and stroked her hair and kissed the scar on her shoulder as if he wanted to take away all the pain it represented. Mandala bent over him and let her hair curl down to touch his shoulders. Cautiously at first, then playfully, then joyfully, they loved each other.

Jim Kirk sat in the officers’ lounge, his hands wrapped around a mug of hot coffee. He felt depressed. The door slid open and Dr. McCoy beetled in.

“Mornin’, Jim,” he said cheerfully, his southern accent strongly in evidence, as it always was when he was under the influence of several drinks, or of a hangover. Kirk could not tell which it was, and he was in no mood to put up with either.

“What a night,” McCoy said. He got himself a mug and sat down across from Kirk. “What a night. The same for you, too? You look like I feel.”

“Yes,” Kirk said, though he was not really listening. “It was quite a night.” He had spent most of it on the subspace communicator, trying to clear away the red tape for Sulu’s transfer, and now he was beginning to think he had made a serious mistake. Perhaps if he had not been so efficient, Mr. Sulu would have

changed his mind.

“I thought so,” McCoy said. “I sure hope you had as good a time as I did.”

“As good a time—?” Kirk went back in his memory over what McCoy had been saying, and realized that since the doctor had only just come back from Aleph, he had no way of knowing about Sulu. In fact, Kirk had seen neither hide nor hair of McCoy since meeting him and his veterinarian friend in the park the day before.

“Bones, what are you talking about?”

“Well—I admit I’d had a few when I ran into you yesterday, but you weren’t that subtle.”

Kirk just stared at him.

“Jim, boy, you really looked happy. I don’t know when I’ve seen you looking so good. Now, you know I think more constancy in some matters wouldn’t hurt you one bit—”

Kirk could not stand it when McCoy got avuncular, especially this early in the morning.

“—so it’s a real pleasure to see you with an old friend.”

Kirk realized what McCoy had inferred. For some reason it irritated him, though, to be fair, McCoy had no particular reason to think anything else. Besides, why should Kirk care what McCoy thought about his and Hunter’s friendship? The truth was no one’s business but their own.

“You’ve got the wrong idea, Bones,” Kirk said.

McCoy slid into the bantering tone by which, all too often, the two men avoided discussing anything that was really important.

“What, Don Juan T. Kirk, Casanova of the space-ways—”

“Shut up!”

McCoy looked at him, startled out of joking, realizing that everything he had said so far this morning was as close to perfectly wrong as an imperfect human could devise.

“Jim,” he said quietly, all traces of the good old boy abandoned, “I’m sorry. I knew you and she used to see a lot of each other, and I just assumed ... I didn’t mean to bring up anything painful.”